There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from data stored in a database. For instance, Crystal Decisions, Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., sells a number of widely used report generation products, including Crystal Reports™, Crystal Analysis™, and Crystal Enterprise™.
In many instances, reports are designed to have salient information as well as detailed information. Some users may wish to view a report in its entirety, while other users may wish to simply view the salient information included in the report. However, previous reporting approaches generally lack sufficient flexibility to deliver a specific portion of a report that may be of interest to a user. Rather, previous reporting approaches often delivered a report in its entirety or an entire page of the report at a time. Moreover, some users may wish to view specific portions of one or more reports. However, previous reporting approaches sometimes lack the ability to effectively link specific portions of one or more reports to provide a navigation path through the one or more reports.
Also, a report can include a number of elements such as, for example, a chart, a map, and the like. Certain devices such as cellular phones may not be able to properly display such a report. In accordance with previous reporting approaches, report designers often had to produce reports that were tailored for specific devices. Such approaches are time consuming and expensive, since multiple reports that contain similar information have to be produced.
It is against this background that a need arose to develop the apparatus and method described herein.